I

AM scarcely rash in assigning to Dr. Horace Howard Furness, the amiable and accomplished editor of the American "Variorum Shakespeare"-a work of stupendous labour and erudition-the authorship of a letter in the Times protesting against the vandalism displayed in our treatment of the Tower of London. In common with most Americans who visit the Tower, Dr. Furness, who has recently been in London, feels what a desecration of the place is involved in using as armouries the chambers most splendid in poetic memories and historic associations. Along the walls upon which the most eminent characters in English history have written their names or recorded their sorrows, are now muskets and other weapons arranged in stars and various patterns. Upon these the conductor expatiates, to the all but entire exclusion of references to history. So long as guides are taken from the class which now supplies them, it is perhaps as well that the historical associations of the Tower should be allowed to rest. As one who has visited not a few places of historical interest at home and abroad, I may say that the views of history one would obtain from trusting the statements of guides and ciceroni would be not a little confusing. American visitors of intelligence bring with them their own knowledge of history. None the less, they are anxious to vivify it by connecting it with the exact scenes of familiar events, and it would scarcely be superfluous to place the guides in a position to state who were among the more illustrious occupants of each chamber.

Some of the explorations of our American visitors perplex not a little the modern occupants of buildings associated with memories of departed greatness. After informing us of pious pilgrimages he had made to spots with which a Londoner is so familiar, they inspire little interest, and awaken scarcely a memory,-of going, for instance, to listen, like Shallow, to the chimes at midnight from St. Clement's Church. The distinguished editor I have mentioned told, also, how he called at one of the houses in which Johnson is known to have resided, and asked to be shown the room in which he is supposed to have lived and worked. "This is the room, sir," said the little Abigail who conducted him. "Leastways, I am told as it is, for the genelman wasn't here in my time." How long will it be, I wonder, before School Boards put an end to this state of affairs? The answer of the little "domestic" might have been taken out of the pages of Dickens. It is worthy of the Marchioness.

A

MONG recent meetings, the place of honour belongs to that of the Index Society. Without fully accepting the implication

of the American Minister, who was in the chair, that indexes constitute a royal road to learning, I will admit that they are among the greatest boons to scholarship that literature has supplied. That we have gone back in respect of index-making since the days of our ancestors will be obvious to any one who compares new books with old. The "table" to Philemon Holland's translation of Pliny's "Natural History" occupies between 120 and 130 folio pages with double columns; and such books as Florio's "Montaigne,” the French edition of Monstrelet's "Chronicles," and the like, are abundantly supplied. To one modern book, at least, I have been obliged, with a view to utilising its contents, to supply an "index" in MS.; and the effort to use others has, in consequence of the want of an index, had to be abandoned. Among comparatively modern books that have come under my ken, the most amply indexed is Wade's "British History Chronologically Arranged," which has sixtyfour pages of double-column index to a thousand and odd pages of text. Thirty-one pages of index, meanwhile, are held sufficient for the eight volumes of Landor's Collected Works, and thirty-six are all that are supplied to the "Histoire des Républiques Italiennes" of Sismondi a book to which, owing to the variety of subjects with which it deals, an ample index is indispensable. Not a few of the books most useful to the student are nothing more than indexes. Almost worse than the absence of an index, unpardonable as this is in the case of works of a certain description, is the presence of an index which is stupidly arranged or misleading. To that amusing and very readable periodical Notes and Queries I would commend, as an entertaining subject, a collection of Curiosities of Index-making.

N the presence of a large assembly, the statue of François Rabelais

a

be the birthplace of the great teacher of Pantagruelism is still debated. Its claims are, however, the best that any French town has put forth. Considering the fitness of the site, there cannot be two opinions. Standing close to the market-place in which are sold those ripe golden and luscious fruits the unequalled profusion of which has gained for the district the name of the Garden of France, it commands a full sweep of the Loire, with the busy and picturesque bridge and the vine-clad hills of Touraine, Behind it stands the old castle, one of the largest and most picturesque of those feudal edifices of France. Almost at the feet of the statue are placed those gifts of nature of which Rabelais counselled the enjoyment. For the proof of his intellectual influence, trace back almost to Paris or forward to

the sea the course of the river flowing by his feet, and see, wherever it goes-whether past Tours and Blois, Amboise and Orleans, or by Saumur and Nantes to lose itself in the ocean at Saint-Nazaire-a country peaceable, enlightened, contented, free. The very monks whom Rabelais denounces as vermin are commencing to disappear, and the educational millennium he anticipated, and the intellectual modes of life he mapped out, seem no longer beyond reach. So quietly and with so little preliminary announcement was the statue inaugurated, that I did not hear of the ceremony in time to be present. Last year, however, I stood upon the spot on which the statue now stands. Meantime, as nothing will wholly extinguish the rancour of British prudery and the ignorance of British Philistinism, there is little cause for surprise at finding in the pages of a London periodical a letter from a correspondent in which Rabelais is once more described as an obscene buffoon."

THE

HE publication of a complete edition of the works of Bret Harte proves that the most genial, original, and national of American humourists is far more prolific than has ordinarily been supposed. His poems and dramas alone occupy a handsome volume of four hundred and fifty pages. I should not draw attention to works which need no advertisement, were it not for the fact that the present edition contains a short personal and quasi-biographical preface of the author. In this Bret Harte disabuses the public of the idea that the invention of his poems and stories was attributable to the accidental success of a satirical poem entitled the "Heathen Chinee." A statement to this effect has been read by him during the present year, in a literary review of no mean importance. He takes, accordingly, the opportunity "to establish the chronology of the sketches, and incidentally to show that what are considered the 'happy accidents' of literature are very apt to be the results of quite logical and often prosaic processes." The most interesting portion of the preface is that, however, in which Bret Harte describes the reception afforded his immortal "Luck of Roaring Camp," when he sent it in to the Overland Monthly, a magazine of which he was at that time editor. "He had not yet received the proof-sheets, when he was suddenly summoned to the office of the publisher, whom he found standing, the picture of dismay and anxiety, with the proof before him. The indignation and stupefaction of the author can be well understood, when he was told that

The Complete Works of Bret Harte, arranged and revised by the author. Vols. I, and II. (Chatto & Windus).

the printer, instead of returning the proofs to him, submitted them to the publisher, with the emphatic declaration that the matter thereof was so indecent, irreligious, and improper, that the proof-reader-a young lady had with difficulty been induced to continue its perusal, and that he, as a friend of the publisher and a well-wisher of the magazine, was impelled to present to him personally this shameless evidence of the manner in which the editor was imperilling the future of that enterprise." Further I dare not quote. Very strange, however, is it to hear that the story was at last published under a kind of protest, inasmuch as the author declared that he should take its non-insertion in the magazine as a proof of his unfitness for an editorial position which he would at once lay down. Nor until the warm recognition of the Eastern States of America, backed up by that of Europe, reached the West, was the story finally acquitted of the charges brought against it. In this instance the difficulty was attributable to Pharisaism and Pietism. It is strange, however, to learn that scarcely one of Bret Harte's stories of Western life found acceptance among those of whom and for whom it was written, until it came forward with the imprimatur of Eastern civilisation.

A

MONG cosas de España are many things which I trust will, until their ultimate extinction, be confined to that melancholy peninsula, in which alone in Europe cruelty has been elevated into a religion. How deeply ingrained is that love of contemplating suffering which distinguishes the Spaniard, finds constant illustration. I thus hear of Spaniards having celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the Inquisition, the existence of which most infamous of all human institutions may be said, in a fashion, to date from the 1st of June, 1480. On that day the Cortes then assembled at Toledo, on the suggestion of Cardinal Pedro Gonzales de Mendoza-backed up, it may be supposed, by Cardinal Ximenes, acting for Ferdinand and Isabella-decreed the formation of a Tribunal of Faith, for the purpose of punishing heretics. Here is indeed an event worthy of commemoration! How completely saturated with blood-lust was the Spanish nation may be inferred when it is told that Lope de Vega, the most illustrious of Spanish dramatists, presided over an auto-da-fé in which a Jew was burned, and wrote his "La Fianza Satisfecha" for the express purpose of stimulating the public hostility to the Jews and so bringing about further persecution. In this atrocious play he represents the Jews as stealing a Christian child, and repeating upon it all the processes of the "Passion," from the scourging by thorns to the crucifixion, and even to the ultimate apotheosis.

SYLVANUS URBAN.

THE

GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE.

OCTOBER 1880.

QUEEN COPHETUA.

BY R. E. FRANCILLON.

CHAPTER XXVI,

Three Flavours of Folly: A Sour Thought, a Bitter Heart, and a Sweet Desire.

Three Songs of Sorrow: Will without Might, Love without Right, Day without Night.

Three Sayers of Sooth: A Dull Ear, a Sharp Eye, and a Rough Tongue.

WAL

ALTER GRAY-as he called himself—had grasped at the opportunity which chance had given him of making Alan Reid his friend. Alan would never recognise, under the disguise of a false name, a man whom he had never seen, and who would be, as a matter of course, the very opposite of what he would imagine him to be. It would never come into his head that a greedy adventurer, fresh in the possession of a great estate, would be amusing himself, as an amateur, with the discomforts of war. Victor Waldron-to call him once more by his true name-had felt few emotions stronger than that wherewith, among the Bats, he had for the first time grasped in comradeship the hand of the man who would have refused the grasp had he known his comrade's name. He was claiming friendship and brotherhood on false pretences; but better on these than on none at all. It was intolerably infamous that Alan should go through life believing the man to be his unscrupulous enemy who would have given a hundred Coplestons to be openly his friend. After all, it was the false name that would represent the inward truth of the matter, since the true name belonged to a lie. Under a false name, and in a false guise, Alan would surely come to VOL. CCXLVII. NO. 1798.

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